It’s official: Facebook files for $5 billion IPO

The rumor mill can finally stop buzzing: investors are invited to "like" …

Facebook is hoping investors will "like" the social network just as much as its users already do. Following a series of rumors that have multiplied in recent weeks, Facebook filed for Initial Public Offering (IPO) on Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission at a value of $5 billion.

The impending IPO has been widely expected among investors and tech circles for some time, with the earliest rumors going back for years. Some expected the company to raise upwards of $100 billion (yes, you read that right—one hundred billion US dollars) but according to the company's S-1 filing with the SEC, Facebook is aiming for a much more reasonable $5 billion to start.

For some extra reading, there's a letter to investors buried within the S-1 filing from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. Below is the text in full:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

As for who might benefit from the IPO, LearnVest published a list last year of the individuals that are believed to have ownership in the massive social network. And, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg has "long been fearful of the damage" an IPO might bring to the company culture. Still, it looks as if Facebook is ready to move forward with the move, but what does it mean for users, or even investors? Stay tuned for further coverage of the Facebook IPO on Ars.